Thursday, August 9, 2012

This month the topic for the August Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival asks us to compare various markets and how our strategies are different within each market. I will be focusing on the various auction durations and what strategies I use to decided which auction duration to assign to the individual market items.

When deciding which auction duration to apply to your auction house goods, there are various factors that should come into play. These factors can include, but are not limited to:

Auction house fee to list the individual item.

Amount of items already listed on the auction house.

How heavy is this market's competition?

How soon do you expect the item to sell?

What time of day are you posting the item?

What day of the week are you posting?

How many do you have total to sell?

Posting 12 Hour Auctions

The shortest auction duration available is the 12 hour time slot. The obvious drawback of using the 12 hour auction duration is that your item will only be up for a limited time. This means you must continually relist this item to keep it on the auction house, which creates more work for you. Sometimes that extra work is required though.

12 Hour auctions are only good for items that are in heavily camped, undercut heavy, competitive markets. The Gem market is the only market that I will use the 12 hour auction times. Well, the current expansion gems that is. I am often the only seller in older expansion gem markets, which allows me to post for longer durations without much drawback in those older gem markets. In the Gem market the biggest reasons to only list for 12 hours are 1) the cost to post Gems and 2) the heavy competition. Gems have a pricey listing fee and are often undercut within hours (if not minutes), so listing for longer than 12 hours almost guarantees you are just tossing extra gold away to the auction house listing fees. The 12 hour duration, while more annoying to relist, will save you plenty of gold in the long run.

Some players will post Glyphs on the 12 hour cycle as well, but I see no point. The cost to list Glyphs is almost nothing and most of us don't have a limited supply of Glyphs, which allows us to just repost more from our bags as we undercut. Plus if you are listing for longer durations and the competition only lists for 12 hours, there will be times that their auctions expire and leave yours as the cheapest. If they miss a posting cycle, or their auctions end at an odd time, there will be a window of oppurtunity to make sales.

I don't sell raw stacks of ore on the auction house. If I was an ore seller, I would post for 12 hours for the same reasons, cost to list and heavy competition.

Posting 48 Hour Auctions

The longest auction duration available in World of Warcraft is the 48 hour auction. The 48 hour auction is ideal for some specific auction house markets. Any rare pattern market or overlooked niche market where you are the only seller is a great candidate for using the longest auction cycle possible. Less work is required, since there is little risk of being undercut. Some examples of rare or hard to obtain pattern markets that I am predominantly the sole seller list for 48 hours are: Deviate Scale Belts, Barbaric Bracers, Whitesoul Helms, Rich Purple Silk Shirts, Voice Amplification Modulators, Chimera's Eyes, rare twink enchants (like +15 Agility to Gloves or +4 Stats to Chest), and max sized profession bags that are gated behind daily grinds. Basically anything with zero or little competition gets posted for the maximum auction duration as I am creating my own market pricing and have little worry of being undercut.

Another group of items that I post for 48 hours are items that can have massive demand spikes that lead to a bunch of sales. These types of markets can see sales for both you and your competition at decent prices, as opposed to getting into massive undercutting wars that do nothing but lower everyone's profit. These are also markets that see a lot of continued sales and are inexpensive to post. Good examples are Netherweave Bags and Mysterious Fortune Cards. Odds are there is no reason to cancel and repost, because you probably have a ton more to sell anyway. By leaving those older undercut auctions alone and just relisting new items underneath the lowest price, you will often see sales of all of your low priced ones and the higher priced ones can also sell. Transmogrification gear and 77-80 Cataclysm greens are 2 more good markets for the 48 hour listings, as long as you aren't battling on specific gear pieces with competition.

Posting 24 Hour Auctions

The largest majority of items that I post, get listed with a 24 hour duration. The 24 hour auction duration is the happy medium between the 12 and 48 hour auction posting options. I definately post most of my items for 24 hours when I am actively playing the auction house on a daily basis. If I know I have very limited time or must skip a day of posting, I will increase my 24 hour auctions to the 48 hour listing, just for longevity. If a market starts to become highly competitive and I am seeing a lot of returned auctions, I may drop my listings down to 12 hour durations, but only on the more expensive listing fee items. But overall, if you are a daily auctioneer, 24 hours is the best option for the majority of markets in WoW.

Anyone have any other markets that they definately only post at 12 hour or 48 hour auction durations?

2 comments:

Leatherworking Leg Armors. Pretty sure like Enchanting mats it's the same price regardless of the amount of time posted. They always go up at 48 hours for me. Tailoring Spellthreads on the other hand do increase in price and are normally 12 hour posts since there tends to be a lot of competition on my server.

Most vendor pets/recipes also go up for 48 hours. I only ever pick them up if I'm near the vendor anyway so I don't concern myself with competition or how quickly they sell.